55 posts categorized "Italy"

The last home of the poet and humanist Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374) in the small Northern Italian town of Arqu√† became a place of literary pilgrimage and tourism early on. Successive 16th-century owners of the house emphasized its connection with Petrarch, among other things by commissioning frescoes depicting his life and works, and welcomed travellers to see the home of the great man.

Travel accounts from the late 16th century onwards describe the house and its various artefacts associated with the poet. Alongside the things one would expect to see in such a place ‚Äď Petrarch‚Äôs chair, the cupboard where he kept his books and so on ‚Äď the accounts also mention the rather ghoulish exhibit of a mummified cat. In a mock epitaph inscribed beneath its body, the cat claims to have been dearer to the poet even than his beloved muse Laura because, while Laura inspired Petrarch‚Äôs verses, the cat ensured their survival by protecting the manuscripts from the gnawing teeth of mice.

The French traveller Nicholas Audebert (whose account is preserved in the British Library, Lansdowne MS 720) visited the house in 1575 and was told that the cat had belonged to Petrarch and used to accompany him everywhere. Accounts by Fynes Moryson and Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, published in 1617 and 1623 respectively, also mentioned the feline monument, and in 1635 the first picture of it appeared in a work by Giacomo Filippo Tomasini, Petrarcha Redivivus. Here the poor creature is exposed on a plinth, rather than in a niche with the epitaph beneath as it is more usually shown and described, although Tomasini does reproduce the text of the epitaph.

The cat continued to capture the attention of visitors. Byron ‚Äď himself a keeper of many pets ‚Äď was apparently delighted by it and the German poet August von Platen dedicated an epigram to it. The monument still features in modern tourists‚Äô TripAdvisor reviews. The story of Petrarch‚Äôs beloved pet, the faithful companion and comfort of his last years has appealed to generations of cat-lovers.

However, there is one drawback to this touching tale: we have no evidence that Petrarch ever owned a cat. Although he makes some mention of his dogs in his letters, and a 2-line epitaph to a little dog called Zabot is attributed to him, there is nothing about any cat. This is surely particularly surprising if he owned a cat so dear to him that he chose to commemorate it after its death. Also, both the mummified cat and the inscription are thought to date from the 16th century, long after Petrarch‚Äôs death. So how did the association come about?

The most likely theory is that it originates from early depictions of Petrarch in illuminated manuscripts where he is sometimes shown with a small dog (a reference to little Zabot?) and occasionally with a cat. In one manuscript of ca 1420, held in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence (MS Strozzi 172), a cat is even depicted chasing a mouse in Petrarch‚Äôs study, the very job described in the epitaph of his supposed pet. But rather than a realistic depiction of Petrarch‚Äôs domestic life and pets, it is more likely that both animals are, in the words of J.B. Trapp, ‚Äúin some sense a replacement for the lion that legend gave to St Jerome for a companion in his studies.‚ÄĚ

St Jerome and his lion, from the Prayer book of Sigismund of Poland, 1524, Add. 15281 f.3v

Nonetheless, it is credible that familiarity with such images might have inspired the 16th-century owners of Petrarch‚Äôs house to invent the story of the poet‚Äôs beloved cat. It has even been suggested by the author of the Shaping Sense blog that the monument was set up as a kind of mockery of the cult of literary pilgrimage and literary relics that its creators were simultaneously trying to encourage.

Whatever the truth, the cat‚Äôs story continues to flourish, especially in the online world. An internet search brings up both sober discussions of the story‚Äôs reliability and fanciful tales about the mutual affection of the animal and its master. Various German websites (such as this one) even attribute to Petrarch the words, ‚ÄúHumanity can be roughly divided into two groups: cat lovers and those who are disadvantaged in life‚ÄĚ, and you can buy a variety of tote bags, fridge magnets and the like bearing this decidedly un-Petrarchan saying with its undoubtedly false attribution.

Caught between his two loves? Petrarch gazes at a picture of Laura while his cat looks on. Engraving by Bartolomeo Crivellari from a drawing by Gaetani Gherardo Zompini, from vol. 2 of Le Rime del Petrarca brevemente esposte per L. Castelvetro ... (Venice, 1756) 638.i.7.

Whether or not Petrarch truly owned and loved a cat, we can safely say he would have been astounded by the physical and literary afterlife of such a creature.

Tags

Of the over 1000 books on the subject of the mafia held at the British Library, about 700 were published after 1992, when the murders of Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino made the whole world talk about the Sicilian mafia. Before then, in the 1980s, it was not uncommon to hear that ‚Äėthe mafia didn‚Äôt exist‚Äô, or that it only existed in Palermo, but not in the rest of Sicily. Denouncing the businesses of Sicilian Cosa Nostra, and its ties with the Italian government, had a high price to pay for too many intellectuals. Just to mention two, in 1978, Giuseppe ‚ÄėPeppino‚Äô Impastato, and, in 1984, Giuseppe ‚ÄėPippo‚Äô Fava, paid for their work with their lives. Peppino Impastato was a political activist, who didn‚Äôt leave many writings behind. The other Giuseppe, on the other hand, was a celebrated playwright, a writer and an investigative journalist, so we have collected most of his works since the 1970s and have recently acquired the full run of the magazine that he edited until his murder, and which was the reason for his murder, I Siciliani.

Coming from rural Sicily, Pippo Fava moved to the town of Catania to study law, and then became a professional journalist in 1952. He wrote for several newspapers and magazines, also establishing himself as author for theatre and cinema (he co-wrote the movie Palermo or Wolfsburg, which won the Golden Bear at the 1980 Berlinale). Given the task of editing IlGiornale del Sud, Fava recruited a team of young journalists and photographers to help him carry out some serious investigative journalism. When he was fired by the owners, who would have preferred him to avoid writing so much about the mafia, he used his charisma and influence to persuade these young journalists to join him in creating a fully independent and self-funded monthly magazine, a loud voice for the anti-mafia movement in Sicily, I Siciliani.

Issues of I Siciliani

Poor in budget but rich in ideas, Fava started with a very clear agenda of the topics to tackle. He wanted people to see Sicily as it really was. Showing the bad was a moral and ethical duty. Murders were photographed and reported without filters, corruptors were named and shamed. The damage to the environment caused by industrial and building speculation was clear to him, and he was not ashamed to talk about it. His stories are still relevant. His most important contribution was identifying the links between national politicians and the mafia, and stating that the mafia was effectively ruling the country; this was something Pippo Fava was saying out loud at times when nobody was ready to hear it (Pippo Fava‚Äôs last interview with Enzo Biagi, December 1983). But I Siciliani also portrays normal life, showing both the rich and profound culture of the island and as the urban lifestyle that must have surprised those who thought of Sicily as the land of The Godfather.

In the first issue, dated January 1983, in his first editorial, Fava was the first to talk about the Catanian mafia, whose existence everyone else was trying to deny. He names the powerful entrepreneurs behind it; he shows their faces, as well as that of Bernardo ‚ÄėNitto‚Äô Santapaola, the local mafia boss.

It wouldn‚Äôt be long. One year later, that same man ordered his murder. Pippo Fava was killed on 5 January 1984, on his way to pick up his grandniece from a theatre rehearsal. I Siciliani tried to survive for a few more years, penniless, mostly relying on subscriptions and a few brave advertisers who didn‚Äôt fear the isolation of the magazine.

If you read it now, I Siciliani is still as shocking, powerful and compelling as it was 30 years ago. The issues are still there. The love for the place is still there. Nothing ever changes in Sicily: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo)

The Italian painter Carlo Carra‚Äô wrote Guerrapittura (‚ÄėWar-painting‚Äô) in 1915, when the First World War had started but Italy had not yet entered the conflict. His words are an important contribution to the interventismo (interventionism), where artists and intellectuals played a huge role in lobbying the public opinion to enter the War.

Guerrapittura is Carra‚Äôs last contribution to the Futurist movement. From 1917 he joined the painter Giorgio De Chirico on his conception of pittura metafisica. His patriotic views are expressed quite strongly in Guerrapittura, the war being an ‚Äėincentive to creativity‚Äô and a way to celebrate the ‚ÄėItalian creative genius‚Äô. The War is seen as the climax of the futurist way of thinking, an encounter between art and life, the last step towards an industrialized world. Literature and painting meet in the book, which features the iconic leaflet ‚ÄėSintesi futurista della guerra‚Äô, authored on 29 September 1914 by Carra‚Äô, together with Marinetti, Boccioni, Piatti and Russolo. The ‚Äėwords in freedom‚Äô in the leaflet celebrate FUTURISM vs TRADITIONALISM. Futurism is represented by Russia, France, Belgium, Serbia, Italy, Japan, Montenegro, Great Britain, against the traditionalism of Germany and Austria.

‚ÄėSintesi futurista della Guerra‚Äô, from Guerrapittura, p. 109

The violence and ugliness of war are ignored in his words and in those of his fellow futurists, like in the magazine Lacerba, whose intolerant and anti-democratic views mirror those of Carra‚Äô in Guerrapittura. Lacerba‚Äôs short life was linked to the interventismo from 1913-1915 and its reason to exist ceased when the war started. The last issue of Lacerba, dated 1915, celebrates Italy entering the War.

How to turn 47,000 pages of old newspapers into meaningful information?

For a research group at the University of Bristol, the answer is: big computers and historical context.

Led by Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, the group digitised 47,000 pages of two Italian-speaking local newspapers from the city of Gorizia, using the facilities of FindMyPast, based at British Library in Boston Spa. Then they used optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract digital text, and finally compared it with the digital text of three Slovenian newspapers from the same place and time, to provide context.

Corriere de Gorizia, an Italian newspaper from the city.

Gorizia lies at the crossroads of the Latin, Germanic and Slavic-speaking worlds, and its population reflects this. Until 1918, it was known as G√∂rz, and was part of the Habsburg Empire, though latterly coveted by the young Kingdom of Italy. These last years before World War One were particularly notable, as the political and ethnic tensions within the empire and over its borders played out in the city itself. The two main linguistic communities, Italian and Slovenian, published their own newspapers, and the latter have been digitised by the Slovenian Digital Library. But until the Bristol University group started work, the Italian ones were preserved on microform alone in the Biblioteca Statale Isontina, which first collected the paper versions.

The team, including computer scientists and a historian, carried out statistical analysis on the newspapers, looking at the frequency of different words or phrases. This process revealed the individual stories of thousands of people, but also the collective trends of a population in the years leading up to the War and the final days of Empire. As the city lies in a quiet corner of central Europe, now divided between Italy and Slovenia, many of these stories and trends had been forgotten until now.

Gorizia cathedral today (Photograph: Janet Ashton)

Professor Cristianini says: ‚ÄúIn the space of a few decades, the town embraced new ways to communicate, such as the cinema and the telephone, along with new modes of transportation, like the car, the airplane, the bicycle and the train. Far from being a backwater in a decaying empire, this was a city with an eye on the future and an interest in new ideas ‚Äď including political ones. It was, however, also a time in which new tensions emerged along ethnic lines and a time of rapid change, with problems and anxieties that sound very familiar to the modern ear. It is incredibly fortunate that the collection of newspapers in the Biblioteca Isontina library survived so many threats. We get a glimpse of the last years of a world heading towards a new chapter in its history during a period that transformed it beyond recognition. We see new technologies, new ideas, new economic opportunities, new cultural challenges and problems.‚ÄĚ

Among the patterns the team extracted are timelines that pinpoint such significant events as the arrival of Halley‚Äôs Comet, the visits of the Emperor Franz Joseph, or the devastating 1895 earthquake in Ljubljana (then Laibach, capital of the Habsburg county of Carniola). Fascinatingly, they found that the earthquake was more noted in the Slovenian-speaking community than the Italian, since Ljubljana was already predominantly Slovenian-speaking itself and had less significance to the Empire‚Äôs Italians as a regional centre.

The Solkan Bridge, carrying the railway over the Sońća river at Gorizia ‚Äď revolutionary in its day as the largest stone arch ever used for a railway bridge (Photograph: Janet Ashton)

Other ground-breaking events in the city at the time included the construction of the new Transalpina/Bohinj railway, which carried tourists from Vienna to Lake Bled and further, but was also to be used for more prosaic reasons. Then, most glamorous of all, two local brothers named Edvard and Josip Rusjan were among the first aviators in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The team‚Äôs findings also highlight how the war transformed the city and its surrounding county into something entirely different. During the war the front lines crossed through Gorizia itself and the urban population was largely relocated. In 1918, Italy annexed it, and twenty years of fascism and then another war followed. After 1947, the border between Italy and Yugoslavia ran right through the former county, partly separating the city centre from some of its neighbourhoods. Until Slovenia joined Schengen in 2007, this border had real impact, leading to the growth of a ‚Äúreplacement‚ÄĚ city, Nova Gorica, on the Yugoslav/Slovenian side, while historic Gorizia became something of a backwater, isolated from its hinterland and feeling neglected by Rome.

The project, from scanning and indexing to in-depth analysis, combined methodologies from both library science and historical research, as well as employing mathematical expertise, and illustrates how digital humanities is bridging the traditional boundaries between disciplines. A full study of the project‚Äôs methods and its findings, ‚ÄúLarge scale content analysis of historical newspapers in the town of Gorizia, 1873-1914‚ÄĚ, by N. Cristianini et al., has recently been published in the journal Historical Methods.

50 years ago today a new era began in Italy. Students joined the global wave of dissent, protesting against the bourgeois value system, fighting for equality and civil rights, and requesting a modernisation of the education system in the country.‚ÄėLa contestazione‚Äô started in Rome, on Friday 1 March 1968. The School of Architecture of the University of Rome, in Via di Valle Giulia, became the battlefield for the first violent encounter in Italy between the student movement and the police.

Fausto Giaccone, Fight between police and students outside the School of Architecture at Valle Giulia. Rome, 1 March 1968. From ‚Äô68. Un anno di confine (Milano, 2008) LF.31.b.4963

Some accounts of the participants have been recorded about that day, which was described as ‚Äėa collective initiation‚Äô. In the words of Oreste Scalzone, a student at the time, who later became a politician:

Freedom was the morning of Valle Giulia. They [the police officers] had seized the school of Architecture [‚Ä¶]. The night before, discussing the protest at a university committee meeting, we decided that we would go to get it back. We woke up early and we went [‚Ä¶ ]. We arrived by the green esplanade and started throwing eggs at the police, who seemed all wrapped up, unprepared, because they were used to repressing protests without expecting any form of resistance. When they charged, we didn‚Äôt run away. We withdrew and then counterattacked [our] stones against [their] tear gas grenades [‚Ä¶] (quoted by Nanni Balestrini in L‚ÄôOrda d‚ÄôOro (Milan, 1997; YA.2001.a.31572); own translation).

At the end of the battle, 148 police officers and 478 of about 1500 protesters were injured, 4 were arrested, and 228 reported to the police.

Among the students and the police officers involved, many then had careers in journalism (Giuliano Ferrara, Paolo Liguori, Ernesto Galli della Loggia), others in politics (Aldo Brandirali, and the above-mentioned Oreste Scalzone), others in the arts, like the actor Michele Placido, the architect Massimiliano Fuksas and the songwriter and director Paolo Pietrangeli, who wrote a song called ‚ÄėValle Giulia‚Äô to celebrate that, suddenly, on that day a new thing happened: ‚Äėnon siam scappati piu‚Äô (‚Äėwe didn‚Äôt run away any more‚Äô). The song quickly became the iconic anthem of the protest: ‚ÄėNo alla scuola dei padroni! Via il governo, dimissioni!‚Äô (‚ÄėDown with the bosses‚Äô schools, out with the government, resignation now!‚Äô).

Pier Paolo Pasolini on the set of The Gospel According to St. Matthew. Picture from Wikimedia Commons

Pier Paolo Pasolini famously wrote about the event. Some verses of his poem ‚ÄėIl PCI ai Giovani‚Äô (‚ÄėThe Italian Communist Party to the Young People‚Äô), written in the aftermath of the Battle of Valle Giulia, have been quoted for decades to state that Pasolini was supporting the police:

But if one reads the full poem, it becomes clear that the Pasolini uses his irony to provoke the students, urging them to abandon their bourgeois rebellion, to take their fight under the wing of the Communist Party and closer to the workers because, in his idea, Communism was the only way to make a revolution happen.

Valentina Mirabella, Curator of Romance Collections (Italian)

References/Further Reading

Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia. Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Wisconsin, 1997) YC.1997.a.3597

Writer, poet, painter, doctor, banished to a small village in Lucania in 1935 for his anti-fascist activities, Carlo Levi (1902-1975) wrote about his experience as a political prisoner in the then remote and extremely poor south Italian towns Grassano and Aliano.

This work, Cristo si √® fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) ‚Äď a combination of diary, novel, sociological study and political essay ‚Äď was published in 1945 and translated into English by Frances Frenaye in 1948.

As Levi explains from the very beginning, the title signifies the peasants‚Äô sense of loss:

We are not Christian ‚Äď they say. ‚ÄėChrist stopped short of here, Eboli‚Äô. ‚ÄėChristian‚Äô, in their way of speaking, means ‚Äėhuman being‚Äô, and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of inferiority. We are not Christians, we are not human beings‚Ä¶

In 1979, the book was adapted into a film featuring also some of the paintings Levi made during that time.

Christ Stopped at Eboli has the poetic narrative of a world seen by peasants ‚Äď a world of superstitions, spells, where respect for the Madonna precedes religion, and the doctors from town are mistrusted. In describing how people lived Levi gives the paradoxical impression that he is the only free man in those villages. This marks a distance between him and that world, but at the same time reveals an empathic calm and love for it; as Italo Calvino says in a preface to the novel: ‚ÄėThe love for things he talks about is a characteristic which we must bear in mind if we want to succeed at defining the singularity of Levi‚Äôs literary work‚Äô.

During the first days of my stay whenever I happened to meet ‚Ä¶ an old peasant who did not know me, he would stop the donkey to greet me and ask ...: ‚ÄėWho are you? Where are you going?‚Äô‚ÄėJust for a walk: I am a political prisoner,‚Äô I would answer. ‚ÄėAn exile? (They always said exile instead of prisoner.) Too bad! Someone in Rome must have had it in for you.‚Äô And he would say no more, but smile at me in a brotherly fashion as he prodded his mount into motion. This passive brotherliness, this sympathy in the original sense of the word, as suffering together, this fatalistic, comradely, age-old patience, is the deepest feeling the peasants have in common, a bond made by nature rather than by religion.

The description of how peasants see the world reminds us somehow of the mythopoetic vision of the primitive societies described in a collection of essays first published in the same year with the title The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man and later reissued as Before Philosophy.

They could reason logically; but they did not care to do it. For the detachment which a purely intellectual attitude implies is hardly compatible with their most significant experience of reality.

That same impossibility of intellectual detachment is observed by Levi:

‚Ä¶ And in the peasants‚Äô world there is no room for reason, religion, and history. There is no room for religion, because to them everything participates in divinity, everything is actually, not merely symbolically, divine: Christ and the goat; the heavens above, and the beasts of the fields below; everything is bound up with magic. Even the ceremonies of the church become pagan rites, celebrating the existence of inanimate things, which the peasants endow with a soul, and the innumerable earthy divinities of the village‚Ä¶

The dramatic description of Matera gives a clear idea of the conditions people lived in at that time:

In the gully lay Matera‚Ä¶ The gully had a strange shape: it was formed by two half-funnels, side by side separated by a narrow spur meeting at the bottom‚Ä¶ The two funnels, I learned, were called Sasso Caveoso and Sasso Barisano. They were like a schoolboy‚Äôs idea of Dante‚Äôs inferno‚Ä¶ They were caved, dug into the hardened clay walls of the gully, each with its own fa√ßade, some of which were quite handsome, with eighteenth-century ornamentation‚Ä¶ The houses were open on account of the heat, and as I went by I could see into the caves, whose only light came through the front doors. Some of them had no entrance by a trapdoor or a ladder‚Ä¶ On the floor lays dog, sheep, goats, and pigs. Most families have just one cave to live in and they sleep all together: men, women, children, and animals. This is how twenty thousand people live. Of children I saw an infinite number. They appeared from everywhere, in the dust and heat, amid the flies, stark naked or clothed in rags: I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty.

When Levi describes the peasant woman Giulia we see again a distance between him and the world he observes ‚Äď similar to the one between the writers of Before Philosophy and the ancient world they observe ‚Äď but also a close, lucid enchantment:

Giulia was a tall and shapely woman with a waist as slender as that of an amphora between her well-developed chest and hips. In her youth she must have had a solemn and barbaric beauty‚Ä¶ Her face as a whole had a strongly archaic character, not classical in the Greek or Roman sense, but stemming from an antiquity more mysterious and more cruel which had sprung always from same ground, and which was unrelated to man, but linked with the soil and its everlasting animal deities‚Ä¶

‚ÄėGiulia‚Äô, painting by Levi reproduced in Carlo Levi e la Lucania

Levi‚Äôs empathy and commitment to help are also very tangible. Although initially reluctant, he used his medical knowledge to help and cure the sick, gaining the respect of the people but also making the local ‚Äėdoctors‚Äô jealous. Still, Carlo Levi the doctor is not immune to the peasants‚Äô magic vision of the world as he is also the poet and painter who immerses himself in it:

The peasant called jaundice male dell‚Äôarco or rainbow sickness, because it makes a man change his colour to that which is the strongest in the spectrum of the sun, namely, yellow. And how does a man catch jaundice? The rainbow walks across the sky with its feet on the ground. If the rainbow‚Äôs feet step on clothes hung out to dry, whoever puts them on will take on the colours of the rainbow, with which they have been impregnated, and fall ill.

As Calvino wrote in his preface, Levi witnessed the presence of a time within his time, of another world within his world, where myth and reality clash. Here again there is a similarity with what H. and H. A. Frankfort wrote in the introduction to Before Philosophy:

Myth is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims the truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behaviour, which does not find its fulfilment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth.

English and Italian editions of Cristo si √® fermato a Eboli

Christ stopped at Eboli is both a great literary work and an important historical text. It is worth reading to have an understanding of the North and South difference within Italy before and after the Second World War.

This is how Alberto Savinio begins the preface to his collection of short stories titled Tutta la vita (‚ÄėA whole life‚Äô). The stories were published in various newspapers and magazines between 1942 and 1944, before being gathered and published under that title in 1946. The British Library holds the edition published in 1953, which contains in addition 13 illustrations of his paintings and drawings.

Now, what happens then when a surrealist painter transfers his skills into writing?

Pieces of furniture talk among themselves revealing uncomfortable secrets to Candido Bove about his wife, while he is sitting on the sofa, sleeplessly overcome with grief as she died just the day before. This is what happens! (In the story ‚ÄėPoltrondamore‚Äô [Lovesofa])

A taxidermist, nicknamed God Almighty, kills and embalms his wife and his assistant, after finding them naked under the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden he made in his house. This is what happens! (In the story ‚ÄėIl Paradiso Terrestre‚Äô [Heaven on Earth]).

When Miss Fuf√Ļ receives the piano she ordered, she notices that it looks bigger; the morning after she finds it breathing heavily and surrounded by little pianos: the piano was pregnant. This is what happens! (In the story ‚ÄėLa pianessa‚Äô [Miss Piano]).

In Savinio‚Äôs short stories ‚ÄúA whole Life‚ÄĚ is injected in pretty much everything, in fact, we could say that objects are more alive than people. What these short stories have in common is that the surreal events their main characters experience have a formative function, that is, surrealism here has a social purpose: it aims at shaking the reality of the main characters, whose life is flattened by loneliness, self-absorption, surrender. As Savinio continues in his preface:

... surrealism, as many of my literary works and paintings demonstrate, does not content itself with representing the shapeless and expressing the unconscious, but it wants to give shape to the shapeless and consciousness to the unconscious

This becomes clearer in Anima, the story of N√¨vulo, a child described by his father as a typical old house in Milan, where fa√ßades do not face the street, but the rear garden: a child with the face turned inward. N√¨vulo has the soul of his brother, who died at birth 32 years before, trapped in his body, this has prevented him to live his life, in fact, has prevented him from even learning to talk.

The social purpose of Savinio‚Äôs work is more explicit in the tale titled ‚ÄėScendere dalla collina‚Äô (Walking down the hill).

Parents, do not let your children grow up under the shadow of a great man‚Ä¶ Equally, do not let them grow up under the shadow of a memorable event or a remarkable idea, and, let me also add: do not let your children grow up under the shadow of a famous name.

It is difficult not to read here a certain autobiographical reference since Alberto Savinio, whose real name was Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico, changed his last name so that he would not be eclipsed by his more famous brother.

The British Library also holds a copy of the prestigious first edition of Alberto Savinio, pittura e letteratura (Milan, 1979; L45/2089, pictured above), a volume with black silk covers printed in gold, the pages printed in Bodoni characters on azure blue paper, and numerous beautiful plates of Savinio‚Äôs paintings glued on the pages.

Tags

In 1965, after sending his short novel to Italo Calvino, who at that time was working for Einaudi, a publishing house, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia received this reply:

I read your detective thriller ‚Ä¶ it will be a popular book ‚Ä¶ Seeing how you are so good and sound at this, I‚Äôve decided, in a bid to match the grim times we are living through, to offer bitter little titbits in every letter. Otherwise where‚Äôs the fun? ... This Sicily is the least mysterious society in the world. By now, everything in Sicily is clear, crystal-clear: the most tormented passions, the darkest interests, psychology, gossip, crimes, lucidity, fatalism, none of these hold any secrets any more, everything has been by now classified and catalogued ‚Ä¶ the entry ‚ÄėSicily‚Äô gives us the rare pleasure, so rare as to be unique, of being able to confirm at each new reading that our information pack on Sicily was already well-stocked and up to date enough. So much that we fervently hope that nothing will change, that Sicily will stay totally the same, so that at the end of our life we can say that there is at least one thing we have managed to know thoroughly! (Italo Calvino Letters, 1941-1985, 2013. p.306. YC.2013.a.12579).

Calvino was probably right, nothing new under the Sicilian sun; however, what would he have said, had he witnessed, thirty years later, the popularity of another Sicilian writer, Andrea Camilleri, whose detective stories have reached a big audience outside Italy? Following the publication of La forma dell‚Äôacqua (Palermo, 1994; YA.1995.a.7115), Camilleri‚Äôs series of novels, which feature the character of Inspector Montalbano ‚Äď a Sicilian detective in the police force of Vig√†ta, an imaginary town in the island ‚Äď has sold about 10 million copies in North America, Australia, and in the UK where, since 2011, the BBC has broadcast the TV adaptation.

The British Library holds a copy of the special edition of Camilleri‚Äôs Gli arancini di Montalbano (2006, YF.2008.b.486), the first collection of short stories featuring Montalbano, first published in 1999. In the 2006 edition, each short story is accompanied with a photograph taken by Ferdinando Scianna to visualize the atmosphere.

The ingredients of the so called sicilianit√†, some of which Calvino lists in his letter - the most tormented passions, the darkest interests, psychology, gossip, crimes, lucidity, fatalism - are brought to the surface by Camilleri making the stories accessible to a broader audience.

Tre castagni, photograph by Ferdinando Scianna, used to illustrate the story ‚ÄėLa prova generale‚Äô in Gli arancini di Montalbano

In the first story, La prova generale (you can hear it read by the author here), with a few pages Camilleri manages to show us a Sicily able to laugh at itself in the beginning, to then sink into despair, dissolving the suspense in an unexpected manner, that is, not with a twist, but by way of changing the very dynamic expected in a detective story. ‚ÄúThis Sicily‚ÄĚ is still able to excite a great deal of curiosity.

Gli arancini di Montalbano is also the title of last short story: by calling the Sicilian rice balls ‚ÄúGli arancini‚ÄĚ, that is, by using the word in the masculine (here in the plural form), Camilleri challenges the Sicilian areas where the feminine is preferred: the author is originally from Porto Empedocle, had he been from Palermo or Trapani he would have chosen the feminine gender, so the title would have been ‚ÄúLe arancine di Montalbano‚ÄĚ - an amusing discussion about this can be read here; and here is what the Accademia della Crusca says).

Disappointingly enough, Camilleri does not tackle this open debate in his story. Nevertheless, it does contain Adelina‚Äôs recipe for the best Arancini, enough to make Inspector Montalbano decide who to spend New Year‚Äôs Eve with. Adelina, Montalbano‚Äôs maid, has two sons bouncing in and out of prison: this rare occasion when both of them are free, ‚Äúrare as the appearance of the comet Halley‚ÄĚ, must be celebrated with Gli arancini. Things, obviously, don‚Äôt go exactly as planned.

Gibilmanna, photograph by Ferdinando Scianna, used to illustrate the title story in Gli arancini di Montalbano

Giuseppe Alizzi, Acquisitions South Support Manager

References

Italo Calvino, I libri degli altri, lettere 1947-1981. (Torino, 1991). YA.2000.a.32812 (Collection of letters written while working at Einaudi. Letters sent to Sciascia p. 538)

The British Library holds a copy of the first edition of Poema a Fumetti by Dino Buzzati, which, published in 1969, is the novelist‚Äôs last literary work.

Cover of Dino Buzzati, Poema a Fumetti (Milan, 1969). Cup.700.ee.12. (An uncensored version of this image appears at the bottom of the post.)

Wait, literary work? Is it a literary work?

It has words in it, yes, and, as the title suggests, is a poem, a story; however, it‚Äôs a story told with more than just words, as these are paired with illustrations, drawn by the author himself. What is interesting about Dino Buzzati‚Äôs last work before his death is that, even though it is not the work for which the writer gained recognition (he won the Premio Strega in 1958 with Sessanta Racconti, a collection of short stories), it is hardly the amusing/adventurous story we expect to read in a comic strip. Certainly, Italians were already familiar with darker comic strips, the so called ‚Äúfumetti neri‚ÄĚ (Diabolik was published for the first time in 1962) and graphic novels (La ballata del mare salato, first of the Corto Maltese series, was published in 1967), but less familiar with a comic strip created by a novelist to re-tell and re-imagine a story from Greek mythology, namely, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Buzzati chose this story to reflect and visualize, on one hand, the literary themes his readers were accustomed to, such as hold and death (Il deserto dei Tartari, 1940; 11567.c.28.); mystery and surrealism (Sessanta Racconti, 1958; 12472.pp.6.); love and women (Un amore, 1963; 12521.h.47.). On the other hand, by modernising it, the story portrays the time the author was living in ‚Äď a time when pop culture was shaping the young generation‚Äôs imagination: the story takes place in modern-day Milan where a singer-songwriter named Orfi descends into the Realm of the Dead to look for Eura, his girlfriend who died recently.

Buzzati‚Äôs Orfi (above) and Eura (below) from Poema a fumetti

The beyond is, in the words of Julian Peters, ‚Äúexactly like the world one has known while living ‚Äď in Orfi‚Äôs case, it looks like modern-day Milan. The only real difference is that there is no death, and consequently, no emotional intensity to one‚Äôs existence. This is because, as Buzzati‚Äôs entire narrative is bent on demonstrating, all human emotions, and above all love and sexual desire, are in one way or another connected to our knowledge of our own mortality.‚ÄĚ ()‚ÄĚ).

Orfi‚Äôs descent into the underworld, from Poema a fumetti

If this does not make Poemaa fumetti a literary work, it does open a new window onto the history of comic strips: although, as Peters argues, ‚ÄúBuzzati‚Äôs graphic narrative makes no attempt to distance itself from the characteristic ‚Äėlowbrow‚Äô elements of pulp comics‚ÄĚ, what it does do is to push the subject matter towards a lyrical depth. And this was something Italians were not used to coming across in a comic strip.

Poema a Fumetti was translated into English for the first time by Marina Harss in 2009, as Poem Strip.

We do not often realise just how much collaboration took place between foreigners working abroad rather than in their native countries in 17th-century Europe. One interesting example of such a collaboration is that between a Dutchman, Cornelius Meyer, and a Czech printer, Jan Jakub (or Giovanni Giacomo) Kom√°rek, who worked and collaborated in Rome, a veritable hive of intellectual activity at that time.

Little is known of Cornelius Meyer except that he was born in Holland in 1629, was generally accepted to be a polymath and trained as an architect, civil engineer and an engraver. He moved to Rome, one of the most vibrant and active capitals in Europe, in the 1680s and died there in 1701. He is principally remembered for his studies on technology, particularly his masterminding improvements to the navigability of the River Tiber in his L‚Äôarte di restituire a Roma la tralasciata navigatione del suo Tevere.

Title-page of Meyer‚Äôs Nuovi ritrovamenti, divisi in due parti (Rome, 1689-96) 49.h.10 (2), showing the alleged dragon seen near the Tiber

He is also remembered for his description and detailed account of the sighting of a dragon ‚Äėnelle paludi fuori di Roma‚Äô, in December 1691. Despite his detailed and beautiful engravings of the beast‚Äôs skeletal remains, Meyer‚Äôs account of the dragon was an elaborate hoax not unlike ‚ÄėPiltdown man‚Äô but was so skilfully produced and illustrated that he duped many learned men and scientific experts.

Engraving of three wearers of different kinds of spectacles, from Nuovi ritrovamenti

Meyer‚Äôs engraving of spectacles and their wearers for his work on various technologies, Nuovi ritrovamenti, divisi in due parti, printed by Komarek on behalf of the Accademia Fisico-matematica, one of the most important scientific academies in Rome, is extremely finely detailed, recalling similar images by Holbein. It imparts a very human perspective on what could have been a dryish discussion of the important science of optics, which had made very considerable advances since Galileo first used the telescope to study the heavens systematically. Moreover, by depicting the wearers of the spectacles in fine detail, two with fulsome beards, all three wearing caps or bonnets, and two wearing beautifully detailed ruffs, thereby modelling their visual aids, Meyer imparts a sense of scale and proportion to his illustration and is able to show the size of the pince-nez spectacles and their respective lenses he has designed (one set of which is even tinted) to their best advantage and how well they would look and fit on the noses of prospective clients.

Title-page of the 1689 volume of Nuovi ritrovamenti, with Komarek‚Äôs imprint ‚Äėall‚ÄôAngelo custode‚Äô.

This co-operation is also a very timely reminder of the very great debt that the whole continent of Europe, and Italy in particular, owes to Germany. It was a German, Johannes Gutenberg, who invented printing with moveable type in the 1450s, something which played such an important role in disseminating new texts and ideas, and created an ever-increasing demand for the printed word. But we should also not forget the debt owed by Italy to German printers and engravers, from Albrecht D√ľrer to Lucas Cranach. From the first introduction of printing to Italy in 1465 by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, who worked in partnership at Subiaco, printing was firmly established in Italy by German printers.